10-minute Golden Dawn ad for the recent election, with English subtitles

Just hours after Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras’s new cabinet was sworn into office on Sept. 23, Twitter users began protesting the appointment of one of his junior ministers, Dimitri Kamenos, from the right-wing anti-austerity party Independent Greeks. Mr. Kamenos had published homophobic, anti-Semitic and racist comments on Twitter.

Within hours, Mr. Kamenos was fired, making his tenure one of the shortest in Greek political history. What’s most worrying about the incident is not his racist tweets, but the fact that reactionary views have gained popularity in crisis-ridden Greece, especially in areas where migrants are arriving in large numbers. And there is real risk that the popularity of these views will increase.

In Kos and Lesbos, the epicenters of the refugee crisis, the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party doubled its share of the vote, exceeding 10 percent in some places.

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In the area of Piraeus around Athens’ massive port, where Mr. Fyssas was assassinated, Golden Dawn increased its share from 7 to 8 percent. Among its overall voters, 16 percent are young and unemployed. Regions like the southern Peloponnese — a traditional stronghold of ex-monarchists, and before that Nazi collaborators during World War II — also rewarded the party by giving it far more votes than the national average.

Last but not least, the Greek police force once again turned to the far right: Poll stations located near police headquarters showed 15 percent of the vote going to Golden Dawn, and election analysts estimate that the neo-Nazis, who present themselves as a “party of order,” received more than 40 percent of police officers’ votes, based on their share of the population in those areas.